Modern Politics by C. L. R. James & Noel Ignatiev

Author:C. L. R. James & Noel Ignatiev
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2013-09-22T04:00:00+00:00

Now great battles have been fought over this theory. I have read many learned professors who try to explain it. They don’t know what they are talking about, because they begin wrongly. You will remember we talked about Kant’s Reason. Here we have another example of the same philosophical method. Marx’s point of view is that you cannot prove the value theory of labor by itself. You can argue from now until 1997; you cannot prove it. He said the value of the theory is what it produces as you develop it, and if from the basis of your theory you get facts and ideas and movements which are an approximation to society as you see it, that is the proof of your original theory, and there is no other proof. So that on this basis of the value theory of labor, Marx says that capitalist production must be looked upon as dependent upon two forces—one, mechanized industry, and number two, labor. He gives these special names of his own. Constant capital he calls mechanized industry, and variable capital he calls labor.

I am not going to bother you with any detailed development of this, but Marx’s idea is that as capitalism, on the basis of value production, produces and develops, the whole secret of it is that the constant capital, the quantity of industrial structure, of mechanized industry, increases in relation to the amount of variable capital, of human labor, which you have to use. A developed country is a country in which, for example, mechanized labor in relation to human labor is about 15 to 1. That is, say, in the United States—I am just giving illustrative figures—if in the United States mechanized labor in relation to human labor is 15 to 1, Great Britain, I expect, would be about 7 or 8, perhaps less, to 1. Russia would be about 4 to 1. As for Trinidad and Nigeria and similar places, they are none to 1 or something like that. (laughter) These of course are not real figures, but I give them to emphasize the enormous difference between a country like the United States and an underdeveloped country.

Now these numerical relations are of profound importance in regard to the development of capitalist society itself. Capitalism is a system that depends upon the world market. It is not a national system at all. If we look at the ordinary capitalist production, we can see one of the causes of its strength in the early days and one of the causes of its weakness today. If I have a factory and I am producing a motor car which costs me five thousand dollars, and the car, let us call it an “A” grade car—you know, one of those long ones you see in Trinidad from about here to over there (lecturer indicates)—I sell it for seven thousand dollars and all is well. It does not matter that this car I am producing is, as far as these monstrosities go, a good car.

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